The ‘Smart’ AI Trainer & Her Quantified Body at Work

Abstract

Most scholarly and governmental discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) today focus on a country’s technological competitiveness and try to identify how this supposedly new technological capability will improve productivity. Some discussions look at AI ethics. But AI is more than a technological advancement. It is a social question and requires philosophical inquiry. The producers of AI who are software engineers and designers, and software users who are human resource professionals and managers, unconsciously as well as consciously project direct forms of intelligence onto machines themselves, without considering in any depth the practical implications of this when weighed against human actual or perceived intelligences. Neither do they think about the relations of production that are required for the development and production of AI and its capabilities, where data-producing human workers are expected not only to accept the intelligences of machines, now called ‘smart machines’, but also to endure particularly difficult working conditions for bodies and minds in the process of creating and expanding the datasets that are required for the development of AI itself. This chapter asks, who is the smart worker today and how does she contribute to AI through her quantified, but embodied labour?

Citation

Moore, P.V. (2021), "The ‘Smart’ AI Trainer & Her Quantified Body at Work", Ajana, B., Braga, J. and Guidi, S. (Ed.) The Quantification of Bodies in Health: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 181-194. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80071-883-820211014